A few weeks ago, roaming the endless aisles of the mammoth Fancy Food show in Washington, D.C., I stopped at the booth for Chozen, a premium ice cream with flavors inspired by the Jewish holidays: matzo crunch, apples and honey, chocolate gelt.

“Who would have the nerve or the chutzpah to put matzo in ice cream?” Chozen co-founder and CEO Meredith Fisher told me. “Jews like to kvetch, but who can kvetch about ice cream?”

It got me thinking about the connection between Jews and ice cream: I’ve reported on Jews in the ice cream business several times during my career as a food writer, without really connecting all the dots. But there are dots to connect. Because while Chozen—founded in 2009 by Meredith Fisher with her mother, Ronne—may be the most obviously Jewish ice cream on the market, it’s hardly the first brand started by Jews. In fact, Jews helped launch the entire craze over premium ice cream four decades ago and have played a key role in its success ever since.

“They are used to catering to a demanding clientele who expect quality, rather than being surprised by it,” explained Ellen Brown, author of Scoop and a food writer for the Providence Journal.

“Jews have always been entrepreneurs and think out of the box,” said Mitch Berliner, a food distributor who has been in the ice cream business for 35 years. “Even about ice cream.”

***

The notion that ice cream was a luxury product dates back more than a century, to the time when Jewish immigrants were flooding into America and ice cream was something that most people churned themselves at home. “Ice cream is generally regarded by families of limited means as a luxury only to be indulged in on special occasions, when company is expected or for birthdays and high holidays,” a writer in the American Jewess explained in 1896. “The poor children, who never get half enough of this frozen delight, are told that it is very unhealthy, and to partake too freely thereof is fraught with the most disastrous consequences to their little stomachs. This widely diffused belief, and the expensiveness of cream when ordered from a confectioner’s, have relegated the most palatable of dainties to the realm of rarely-to-be-attained desires.”

Ice cream became a much cheaper consumer product decades later, and today giants like Nestlé and Unilever control most of the mass-produced ice cream on supermarket shelves. But in the 1970s, a Jewish immigrant from Poland changed the business forever and made ice cream a luxury product once again.

Reuben Mattus started in the ice cream business in the 1920s as a child of 10 just after he and his widowed mother, Leah, stepped off the boat in America. His uncle was in the Italian lemon-ice business in Brooklyn, and Reuben joined him, helping his mother squeeze lemons for the ices they sold in Brooklyn and then the South Bronx.

Until 1927, when the first refrigerator was manufactured, ice cream was seasonal. “In those days, we bought the ice from the Great Lakes in the winter and buried it with sawdust in pits in the ground until summer,” Mattus told me when I was researching my book Jewish Cooking in America, before he died in 1994. By the late ’20s, the family began making ice pops, and by 1929 chocolate-covered ice-cream bars and sandwiches.

“People wouldn’t buy our ice cream,” Mattus remembered. “I said to myself, ‘Why can’t we make good ice cream so people will buy it?’ Then I got a hold of some books and studied how to make ice cream. The first thing I told my mother was to fire our ice-cream maker.”

Mattus’ new kind of ice cream was so heavy that he had to change his equipment. “The most important thing is to make it taste good,” Mattus said. But the second most important thing was to market it properly. “I prided myself on being a marketing man,” he told me. “If you’re the same like everybody else, you’re lost. The number one thing was to get a foreign sounding name.”

How did a Polish immigrant come up with a name like Häagen-Dazs? He was inspired by Jewish history: “The only country which saved the Jews during World War II was Denmark, so I put together a totally fictitious Danish name and had it registered,” Mattus told me. “Häagen-Dazs doesn’t mean anything. [But] it would attract attention, especially with the umlaut.”

Mattus also made sure to get his product certified kosher: “If I made good ice cream, I wanted my people to get it, so I made it kosher,” he said. Häagen-Dazs—which was later sold to Pillsbury in the 1980s—was first sold in Manhattan’s gourmet shops in pint containers, as a luxury product. “Schrafft’s cost 52 cents a pint. Ours was 75 cents a pint,” he told me. “I didn’t believe in selling it for 59 cents. I made a special ice cream for people who wanted a special taste. That was my attempt and it worked. It sold by word of mouth.”

By 1973, Häagen-Dazs was being distributed nationally. And that same year, another man, married about that time to a Jew who became his business partner, was making ice cream history near Boston: Steve Herrell opened Steve’s in 1973 in a converted dry-cleaning joint in Somerville, Mass. The shop, with its mismatched chairs and tables in wild colors, looked like many other comfortable college hangouts, but it wasn’t.

When Steve’s opened, most ice cream being sold was vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry; even Häagen-Dazs’ most exotic flavors at the time were rum raisin and boysenberry, according to Berliner, Häagen-Dazs’ first distributor outside New York. Herrell decided the time was right to mix things up a bit.

Herrell lived in a co-op at the time, sharing a house in Cambridge with six roommates. “One of my housemates told me that she had been to a place in Miami where they would mix things on a slab, and she said why don’t I try that. We could then say that we had thousands of flavors,” Herrell told me several years ago when I was researching an article for Bon Appetit. “But since that time, I have been unable to find out what this place was in Miami. Then, again, mixing things into food is not new, so generally what my response is that I introduced mixing in to the commercial ice cream trade.”

As the flavors multiplied, Herrell wrote them in different colors on little slats of wood in the shop: malted vanilla, cookie dough, peanut butter swirl, triple chocolate pudding, with mix-ins like Heath Bars and M&M’s. Who’d ever tasted, or for that matter even imagined, such flavors almost 40 years ago? Long lines formed every night for Steve’s ice cream.

By making “mix-ins” big business, Herrell cemented his place in ice cream history. Burned out from 90-hour work weeks, he sold his ice cream shop in 1977. (The store became a chain, was sold again, and finally closed; last year, David Stein, one of Herrell’s former employees from his original shop, revived the brand, producing pints for sale in stores.)

But Herrell didn’t stay out of the business for long: He opened Herrell’s ice cream parlor in Northampton, Mass., in 1980—that’s where I caught up with him, chatting in one of his store’s wooden booths while a scooper behind the counter mixed Heath Bar pieces into malted vanilla ice cream for me.

I asked Herrell how he felt now that his idea for “mix-ins” had spread throughout the country, with little financial benefit to him. “Good,” he told me. “I feel it is very rewarding that people love so much what I have done. I can barely handle this small business with bookkeeping, personnel, and a landlord. Fortunately, it is for me balanced off by seeing and talking to happy customers, seeing people enjoying their sundaes and shakes.”

Herrell also influenced another important Jewish ice cream company: One day in the mid-’70s, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield came to watch Herrell chop up Heath Bars and Oreos and mix them into ice cream. “Steve pioneered the rejuvenation of homemade ice cream and mix-ins,” said Greenfield.

Inspired by what they saw, Cohen and Greenfield opened their first Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor in 1978 in Burlington, Vt., in a converted gas station. “At first we incorporated mix-ins; then we realized that we weren’t very good at it,” said Greenfield. “We muddled through for a while, and then we made flavored mix-ins like Oreo mint and vanilla Heath Bar crunch.”

Brown, the food writer, sees Herrell and Cohen and Greenfield as part of a larger trend: “A lot of ice cream businesses were started by baby boomers,” she said, “back when the baby boomers were young hippies and a lot of their parents helped them get the businesses going.”

Chozen, the latest in the line of Jewish ice cream companies, is also a family affair, only this time the mom stayed involved. “My two daughters were sitting and eating frozen rugelach one night, and one of them said, ‘Wouldn’t that taste good in ice cream?’ ” said Ronne Fisher, co-founder and chief “flavor officer” of Chozen. After a weeklong course at ice cream university to learn the basics, she bought a machine and started making ice cream with rugelach, matzo, halva, babka—all kosher and dairy. “These delicious flavors are typically Jewish and Eastern European,” she said, noting that flavors on the horizon include blueberry blintz and matzo kugel.

The Fishers don’t see themselves as a mass-market producer, though. “I think we are a niche business,” Ronne Fisher continued. “We have no aspiration to be Häagen-Dazs. It’s just the two of us. We love it. We are small. Our hope is to bring smiles to people’s faces.”

***

Like this article? Sign up for our Daily Digest to get Tablet Magazine’s new content in your inbox each morning.

Joan Nathan is Tablet Magazine’s food columnist and the author of 10 cookbooks including Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France.

WAIT, WHY DO I HAVE TO PAY TO COMMENT?
Tablet is committed to bringing you the best, smartest, most enlightening and entertaining reporting and writing on Jewish life, all free of charge. We take pride in our community of readers, and are thrilled that you choose to engage with us in a way that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. But the Internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion, allowing vocal—and, often, anonymous—minorities to drag it down with invective (and worse). Starting today, then, we are asking people who'd like to post comments on the site to pay a nominal fee—less a paywall than a gesture of your own commitment to the cause of great conversation. All proceeds go to helping us bring you the ambitious journalism that brought you here in the first place.

I NEED TO BE HEARD! BUT I DONT WANT TO PAY.
Readers can still interact with us free of charge via Facebook, Twitter, and our other social media channels, or write to us at letters@tabletmag.com. Each week, we’ll select the best letters and publish them in a new letters to the editor feature on the Scroll.

We hope this new largely symbolic measure will help us create a more pleasant and cultivated environment for all of our readers, and, as always, we thank you deeply for your support.

Nice article. I believe that Barricini ice cream also had Brooklyn Jewish roots. One thing I have always wondered about is whether there is a link between this East European Jewish role in creating quality ice cream and the marvelous ice cream (morozhnaya) one gets in Russia. Russian ice cream, in terms of character and richness, is much closer to what the big commercial outfits in America used to market as “French Ice Cream” than actual ice cream in France, which tends to be a bit watery. Back in the Cold War days, Russians and Americans would often agree that while our nations had their serious differences, we were both terrific ice cream makers.

Great article. Of course, adding mix-ins to ice cream ala Steve’s and Ben and Jerry’s, two Jewish guys from Long Island, is nothing new. Italian and French ice cream makers were adding ingredients like eggplant to ice cream as early as the late 17th century.
Laura Weiss, author, Ice Cream: A Global History.

Kind of bewildering that there’s no mention of Baskin-Robbins here. While I way prefer Häagan-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s, Baskin-Robbins stores were first on the scene way back when as the gourmet ice cream presence was first making itself known. At least on Long Island where I grew up.

Haven’t you forgotten to include Baskin-Robbins 31 flavors in your article about Jewish ice cream innovators? Both Irv Robbins and brother-in-law Burt Baskins were Jewish.

Name (required)Email (required, will not be published)Website (optional)

Message

2000

Your comment may be no longer than 2,000 characters, approximately 400 words. HTML tags are not permitted, nor are more than two URLs per comment. We reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.